Songs of Paradise: Why Calling Out Erasure Invites Right-Wing BacklashIn Permission to Narrate, Edward Said observed how Palestinians were routinely denied the right to speak for themselves, their stories muted or reshaped to suit dominant sensibilities. A similar dynamic operates in Kashmir, where narratives are often stripped of their socio-political realities and re-fashioned to align with nationalist sentiment. This is where Songs of Paradise becomes telling: the film celebrates Kashmiri music, but in doing so, sidesteps the socio-political conditions that shape the lives of the very people whose art it seeks to honour.
As the Koshur Musalman podcast has argued, the Indian state’s presence in Kashmir is not only marked by guns, violence, checkpoints, and bloodshed, but also by cultural events and “development” projects that serve as softer manifestations of authority. While military occupation is recognised as abnormal, state-sponsored festivals or musical programmes are rarely seen in the same light. This normalisation of state power through culture is precisely what Songs of Paradise risks echoing — celebrating music while erasing the politics that shape Kashmiri lives off-screen.
Films that intend more to erase than to reveal rely on simplistic either–or binaries, which deepen stereotypes. They cut characters off from their lived realities—realities that might be “uncomfortable” for the masses to consume—and instead aestheticize their lives in a nostalgic tone. In this way, “representation” itself becomes another commodity to be bought, sold, and consumed.
It is important because the way our stories are narrated is also the way they are remembered. To smooth over the conflicts and irregularities in the life of someone as fondly loved as Raj Begam does grave injustice — not only to her story but also to the many stories her life was interwoven with. And when one is denied the agency to narrate their own story, the “cinematic experience” matters little.
This became clear when journalist Gafira Qadir published a well-researched critique of the film in Middle East Eye. Instead of being engaged with, her piece was met with mockery and a smear campaign by right-wing echo chambers. The vocabulary deployed by these outlets leans on a lazy lexicon, of which the keywords are familiar: “Muslim conservative,” “propagandist,” “fake victimhood.” Qadir’s case illustrates how freedom of expression may claim to guarantee equal space for all voices, but in practice it uplifts some while marginalising and silencing others.
The fury directed at Qadir also reveals the insecurity of the right wing and its drive to homogenise indigenous narratives with colonial majoritarian sentiment. The right-wing points to Kashmir’s mountains, valleys, pashmina, and Kahwa as evidence of “representation,” yet this is hollow, turning culture into commodified and exoticized markers rather than genuine voices. What emerges is a localized orientalism. As Joseph Lumbard has observed: “Orientalism does not allow for native agency. The native is thus only given or allowed a voice once they have been culturally, ideologically, and epistemically conscripted. Once conscripted, individuals are then allowed to have a stage or a voice, so long as it can be seen as contributing to the continuing production of epistemologically and politically domesticated subjects.”
The fact that Songs of Paradise’s cast includes mostly Kashmiri actors is irrelevant as long as the stories of those censored are not told with their agency, with all the upheavals included and documented rightfully.
Lumbard continues: If the native decides to challenge the epistemic hierarchy imposed by colonial power, they are often termed “dogmatic,” “essentialist,” or “non-critical”—exactly the treatment meted out to Qadir.
The epistemicide of Kashmiri stories erases collective memory and strips away political consciousness. What is not mainstreamed is sidelined. For Kashmiri viewers, this produces an alienating gap: films aestheticize their lives into digestible images while erasing the violence that structures them.
The smear campaign against Qadir is also ironic. Defenders of the film, while praising it as an example of women’s empowerment, were themselves at the forefront of attacking a woman solely for voicing her opinion. This also reveals how stories about Muslim lives are only sold well when the Muslim man is cast as a vile villain who needs to be shown his place by hook or by crook, while the Muslim woman fights patriarchy in the meantime, waiting to be saved at the end.
When books narrating Kashmiri lives are banned while films that distort them are promoted, the question remains: what counts as representation, and who decides it?
